The legality of selective economic prerequisites for voting was affirmed consistently by the courts. In 1902, for example, the New York Court of Appeals upheld a state law that permitted the village of Fulton to restrict voting on financial propositions to those owning property in the village. Distinguishing between the right to vote in general state elections and the right to vote on municipal financial matters, the court ruled that the legislature had the right and duty “to protect the taxpayers of every city and village in the state.” “And what better or more effective method of preventing . . . abuses and protecting . . . taxpayers could be devised,” queried the court, “than to restrict the right of voting upon propositions for borrowing money or for contracting debts, to the persons who are liable to be taxed for the payment of such debts?” Similarly, the supreme court of Kansas found a way to rule that the taxpaying requirement for drainage board elections was constitutional, despite the fact that the Kansas Constitution—like many others written at midcentury—expressly banned property and tax qualifications for voting. The court concluded that the precedent established by the enfranchisement of women in school board elections made clear that the provisions of the state constitution applied only to those offices and elections explicitly mentioned in the constitution itself. The U.S. Supreme Court made clear that it too did not see anything unconstitutional about taxpaying or property requirements in Myers v. Anderson in 1915. Although the Court overturned the Maryland law that limited suffrage in Annapolis to taxpayers, it did so only because of a grandfather clause that permitted nontaxpayers to vote if they were the descendants of men who had been legal voters in 1868. The Court thus found the law to be racially discriminatory in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment; at the same time, however, it noted that economic discrimination in the form of a property requirement was presumed to be “free from constitutional objection.”27
This same reasoning permitted numerous states to continue excluding paupers from the franchise. As Table A.6 indicates, a dozen states, all in the Northeast and the South, barred from the franchise any man who received public aid. In addition, four states excluded inmates of poorhouses or charitable institutions, and many more throughout the country prohibited such inmates from gaining a legal residence in the town or city where the institution was located. Paupers therefore could not vote unless they were able to travel to their community of origin, an unlikely prospect. With the exception of Arkansas, no state repealed its pauper exclusion law, while many of the statutes aimed at inmates were passed after the Civil War.28
The reach of the laws, however, was narrowed. Whatever ambiguity might once have existed regarding the definition of pauper, it was well understood in the late nineteenth century that the term applied only to men who received public support. Legislatures and courts also took steps to clarify the temporal dimensions of the exclusions, usually (but not always) specifying that a man was barred from the polls only if he was a pauper at the time that an election was held: prior pauperism was not grounds for disfranchisement. In Massachusetts, the House of Representatives asked the Supreme Judicial Court in 1878 to give an advisory opinion regarding “whether a person who is admitted to have been, and to have ceased to be, a pauper, must have ceased to be such for any definite period of time before he can exercise the right of suffrage.” The court concluded that no such period of “probation” was required. “The disqualification of pauperism or guardianship, like that of alienage or nonage, is not required to have ceased to exist for any definite period of time, in order to entitle a man . . . to exercise the right of suffrage.” New Hampshire was less generous: anyone receiving aid within ninety days of an election was disqualified.29
Despite the temporal limitations, pauper exclusions prevented thousands of men in Massachusetts (and perhaps hundreds of thousands nationwide) from voting. As important, the disciplinary edge to the laws remained sharp: the reason that the Massachusetts House of Representatives sought an opinion from the Supreme Judicial Court was that it hoped to apply the pauper exclusion law to all men who had received relief at any time during the year preceding an election. To do so, it considered requiring local overseers of the poor to report the names of such men to election officials. The legislature’s concern stemmed from the dramatic increase in the number of persons seeking public relief during the prolonged depression of the 1870s. Despite abundant evidence that those people were jobless “through no fault of their own,” many respectable citizens were convinced that men who sought relief were “slackers,” “loafers,” and “tramps” who needed to be disciplined: not coincidentally, the same legislature that sought to extend the pauper exclusion law passed “anti-tramp” legislation making it a crime for a jobless man to travel from town to town in search of work. As Charles T. Russell, a critic of these laws, noted, those who advocated the redefinition of pauper to include “a person who has within a year received public assistance” believed that paupers were not unfortunate but unworthy, that “once a pauper always a pauper.”30
That the pauper disqualification could serve as a means of social discipline also was revealed in the course of a strike in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1898. When striking textile workers sought public relief to help tide them over months without income, they were told by city officials that receiving such relief would disqualify them from voting in the next election. The announcement sparked an uproar in New Bedford, particularly when one striker, despite illness in his family, withdrew his application for aid so that he would not be disfranchised. After the mayor had been informed of his plight, legal guidance was sought from the city solicitor, who then dug up the Supreme Judicial Court’s 1878 opinion and announced that relief recipients could vote if they had ceased receiving aid by election day. The solicitor’s report was front-page news in the overwhelmingly working-class city, and advocates of disfranchisement backed off. Nonetheless, the message was clear: poverty could cost workingmen their political rights. Turning to the state for aid had a price and would transform a needy worker into something less than a full citizen. The national magazine of the machinists’ union reported on the case in detail, observing that “if the capitalistic class succeeded in robbing every man of his vote who was forced to apply for relief, it wouldn’t be long before a great percentage of our citizens would be voteless. There is nothing they fear so much as a vote.”31
Immigrants Unwelcomed
In my judgment, whenever the United States finds itself at war with a foreign country, and realizes the need of soldiers, the need of strong bodies, brawny arms and brave hearts, they will be liberal enough in extending the right of suffrage and the facilities to become citizens to our foreign born fellow men. But in times of profound peace, when war’s dread alarms are not sounding through the land, they relapse back into the old channel, and require them to serve an apprenticeship before they shall become voters or citizens of the United States.
—MR. BURNS, OHIO CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, 1874
Overtly class-based economic restrictions were accompanied by legal changes expressly designed to reduce the number of “undesirable” immigrants who could vote. Beginning in the 1890s, the nation witnessed the growth of a significant movement to restrict immigration altogether, one source of which was widespread middle-class anxiety about the impact of the foreign-born on politics, particularly urban politics. The effort to keep immigrants from the polls, however, was somewhat distinct from the movement for outright restriction, and it bore fruit long before Congress passed the pathbreaking restriction and quota acts of 1921 and 1924.32
One critical step in this campaign was the revocation of state laws that permitted noncitizen declarants (those who had lived in the United States for two years and formally filed declarations of their intent to become citizens) to vote. As described in Chapter 2, such laws became common in the Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century, and they also were enacted in parts of the South and West after the Civil War. Yet even before the last of these laws were passed, in the 1880s and 1890s
, the pendulum of public opinion had begun to swing in the opposite direction. (See Table A.12.) As the ratio of immigrant workers to settlers soared and the need to encourage settlement diminished, granting the franchise to noncitizens seemed increasingly undesirable and risky.
At the Ohio Constitutional Convention of 1873-1874, for example, a committee recommendation in favor of enfranchising declarant aliens produced days of stormy debate. Ohio was one of the few midwestern states that had not authorized noncitizen voting, and proponents of the new law, many of them Democrats and some foreign-born, offered a variety of arguments for bringing the state in line with its neighbors. Enfranchising aliens who had filed “first papers” would encourage migration, attach immigrants to American institutions, and justly reward loyal aliens who had fought in the Civil War or might serve in the military in the future. Denying noncitizens the vote stigmatized the foreign-born and implied that they were inferior to recently enfranchised blacks. Opponents of alien suffrage countered with Parkmanesque images of ignorant, foreign-born paupers ill-equipped to participate in democratic politics. They also contended that suffrage ought to derive from citizenship, that it was unconstitutional for the state to usurp the federal government’s authority to create citizens, and that it was “dangerous to confer suffrage upon those who owe their allegiance to foreign powers.” Reflecting the heat of a simultaneous debate about women’s suffrage, some opponents further maintained that it would be unseemly, if not unjust, to enfranchise alien males while women remained voteless.
Embedded in these opposition arguments were strident emotions, a xenophobia that interlaced leftover Know-Nothingism with newly intensified anxieties about racial equality. Lewis D. Campbell, a delegate from the small town of Butler, insisted that the racial equality provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments heightened the menace of immigration. If alien suffrage were permitted, Campbell also feared that wealthy “foreign capitalists,” such as “the Rothschilds,” could control American elections by “colonizing” aliens into key electoral districts. Just how widespread the fear of blacks, Jews, and the missing link may have been is impossible to determine, but Campbell, a Republican-turned-Democratic congressman and vice-president of the constitutional convention, was hardly the only delegate to voice xenophobic concerns. After a week of debate, the proposal to enfranchise aliens in Ohio was defeated.33
it will be granted not only to the unnaturalized foreigner who comes here from European countries, but also to the unnaturalized African who might be brought over . . . by Dr. Livingstone; and should he capture in the jungles of that benighted land . . . a specimen of the connecting link between man and the animal, as described by the theory of Darwin, and bring him to Ohio, that link could not only claim to become a citizen of the United States, but without naturalization . . . claim to be a sovereign, a voter and an office-holder. . . . The Chinese, the Japanese, and even the Ashantees, who are now at war with England . . . could become voters.
The debate in Ohio was unusually prolonged and colorful, but there was nothing unusual about either its content or the outcome of the vote: most states rejected alien suffrage proposals in the late nineteenth century, and beginning with Idaho territory in 1874, states that had permitted noncitizens to vote began to repeal their declarant alien provisions. This rollback picked up steam in the wake of the depression of the 1890s and the assassination of President McKinley by an immigrant in 1901; it accelerated again during and after World War I, when concerns about the loyalty of the foreign-born contributed to a rare instance of wartime contraction of the franchise. The last state to permit noncitizens to vote was Arkansas, which abolished the practice in 1926.34 (See Table A.12.)
While alien suffrage was being phased out, numerous states placed new obstacles in the path of immigrant voters: most commonly these were supported by some Republicans, opposed by Democrats, and justified on the grounds that they would reduce fraud. One such obstacle was to require naturalized citizens to present their naturalization papers to election officials before registering or voting. Although not unreasonable on its face, this requirement, as lawmakers knew, was a significant procedural hurdle for many immigrants, who might easily have lost their papers or been unaware of the requirement. “A sad feature” of New Jersey’s requirement, observed the New York Herald in 1888, “was that many persons will be deprived of their vote, as their papers are either worn out, lost, or mislaid.” Particularly when coupled with provisions that permitted anyone present at the polls to challenge the credentials of immigrant voters, these laws placed substantial discretionary power in the hands of local officials. 35
Another method, mildly echoing Know-Nothing demands, was to prohibit naturalized citizens from voting unless they had been naturalized well before any specific election. Couched as an antidote to mass election-eve naturalizations, these laws placed a unique burden on foreign-born citizens and prevented aliens from deciding to become citizens because they had become interested in the outcome of a particular election. (Since few aliens became citizens as soon as the five-year minimum residency period had expired, such decisions were likely not unusual.) Indeed, in 1887, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts overturned the commonwealth’s statutory one-month waiting period on the grounds that it was not a “reasonable” regulation of electoral procedures but was instead “calculated injuriously to restrain and impede in the exercise of their rights the class to whom it applies.” This logic, however, was not embraced in other courts: five states did impose waiting periods on the foreign-born. In New York and California, immigrants had to wait a full ninety days after naturalization before they could vote. (See Table A.12.)36
The concerns that prompted such efforts to keep immigrants from the polls also contributed to the tightening of federal immigration and naturalization laws between 1880 and the 1920s. Keeping undesirable immigrants out of the country or keeping them from being naturalized was viewed as one of the best “safeguards of the suffrage” by many who were apprehensive about immigrant voters. Immigration and naturalization laws in fact had changed very little between 1802 and the 1880s, although Congress in 1870 passed a law specifying that “aliens of African nationality and persons of African descent,” as well as whites, were eligible to be naturalized. (Exactly what “white” meant was debated in the nation’s courts for decades.) Beginning in 1882, however, Congress began to narrow the channels through which the flow of European immigrants passed. In that year, it enacted a law that barred convicts, “lunatics,” “idiots,” and people likely to become public charges from entering the United States. A head tax of 50 cents was imposed on each immigrant, and steamship companies were required to screen their passengers and provide return passage for any who were refused admission. In subsequent years, the list of undesirables was extended to include contract laborers, polygamists, those suffering from dangerous contagious diseases, epileptics, professional beggars, and anarchists.37
Between 1906 and 1910, Congress also codified the naturalization laws, prohibiting many “undesirable” foreign-born residents from becoming citizens, setting a time limit on the validity of declarations of intent, and requiring candidates for naturalization to write their own names and present ample proof (including witnesses) of their eligibility and continuous residence in the United States for five years. These laws were unabashedly aimed at making it more difficult for men and women to become citizens, and by all accounts they succeeded, reducing the proportion of immigrants who could vote. Some judges, moreover, applied a political litmus test to potential citizens, refusing to naturalize men “with the slightest sympathy for the principles of Socialism” or trade unionism. In 1912, a federal judge in Seattle even revoked the citizenship of a naturalized citizen who espoused socialism.38
The most controversial reform of the immigration laws was the imposition of a literacy or education test for admission to the United States. This idea was first introduced in Congress by Henry Cabot Lodge in 1895: although passed with bipartisan support,
it was vetoed by President Grover Cleveland early in 1897. For the next two decades, it was reintroduced almost annually, garnering the support of a unique, if not bizarre, coalition of northern professionals, many Republicans, southern Democrats, anti-Catholics, anti-Semites, and the American Federation of Labor. Although unstated, the bill’s target was clearly the “new” immigrant population, eastern and southern Europeans who had high rates of illiteracy (more than 20 percent in 1914) and who generally were regarded as less desirable than their English, German, Scandinavian, and even Irish predecessors. There also was an unmistakable class thrust to the proposal: as one supporter tellingly argued, After the turn of the century, literacy qualifications for immigrants were passed twice more by Congress and vetoed, first by William Howard Taft and then by Woodrow Wilson. During World War I, however, concerns about the loyalty of the foreign-born, coupled with a new emphasis on the “Americanization” of immigrants, gave a boost to the measure, and in 1917 Congress mustered enough votes to override Wilson’s second veto.39
the theory of the educational test is that it furnishes an indirect method of excluding those who are undesirable, not merely because of their illiteracy but for other reasons . . . there is a fairly constant relation between illiteracy, the amount of money brought by the immigrant, his standard of living, his tendency to crime and pauperism, [and] his disposition to congregate in the slums of cities.
The Right to Vote Page 21
